The ends don’t justify the means

The outcome we arrive at depends on the process and is ultimately influenced by the process. We cannot hope to host a process that is equitable while intentionally leaving people out and making decisions about their lives. This is a paternalistic method because a decision about what is best for other people without asking them what they need. I’ve seen this throughout my career in the large and small moments of organizational development and maintenance. The ends don’t justify the means.

I know that we’ve been led to believe that they do. But if the process you choose to make a decision leads to the dissolution of trust then the endpoint is weakened no matter how profound or meaningful it might be.

Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones point out in their list of characteristics of white supremacy culture, paternalism is a cornerstone of white supremacy culture. I believe that patriarchy plays a big role here as well due to the sense of domination that is inherent in paternalism. Okun & Jones point out that paternalism is identified by the following characteristics:

those holding power control decision-making and define things (standards, perfection, one right way)

those holding power assume they are qualified to (and entitled to) define standards and the one right way as well as make decisions for and in the interests of those without power

those holding power often don’t think it is important or necessary to understand the viewpoint or experience of those for whom they are making decisions, often labeling those for whom they are making decisions as unqualified intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, or physically

those without power understand they do not have it and understand who does

those without power are marginalized from decision-making processes and as a result, have limited access to information about how decisions get made and who makes what decisions; at the same time they are completely familiar with the impact of those decisions on them

those without power may internalize the standards and definitions of those in power and act to defend them, assimilate into them, and/or collude with those in power to perpetuate them in the belief that this will help them to belong to and/or gain power; they may have to do this to survive

These characteristics run rampant in rigidly hierarchical organizations. When we adhere to the organizational chart without question then we further entrench these characteristics. There is an assumption by the people at the top of the chart that the people below don’t know enough or don’t have a broad enough view to make a proper decision. The people who are making the decisions may have risen through the ranks and they assume they know what it’s like the lower down the chart because “they have been there.” They know what it’s like to sit in those positions without power. This ignores the realities of the present and biases these perspectives (and the decisions made) to the context of 20 or 30 years ago.

So what do we do about this?

If that paternalistic hierarchy is entrenched then there may seem like there isn’t much to do. But Frederick Douglass told us that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” So what do we demand?

These decision-making processes need to be open and understood throughout an organization. Transparency is preventative. I try to keep this in mind when I’m in a position to make decisions and invite critique and feedback (I have room to grow here too as I know I have failed at this). We can also ensure that these decisions are made in conjunction with the people who will be impacted by the decision.

Okun offers us some antidotes to paternalism as well that include creating a culture of appreciation for the way that everyone contributes, education about how power operates for everyone involved (including those who hold it), recognizing that every decision will have unintended consequences, and many more.

adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy also provides a way to address how we think about decision-making. She says “How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.” Meaning our organizations, our workplaces, are not created by the big moments. They’re created and recreated every day by the small moments we have with each other. The check-in conversations and the relationship development all matter to the big stuff. If you’re concerned about how your organization works together, you have to consider the small things.

It is beyond time to reconsider how we wield power when we hold it and what we do when we don’t. It makes sense that we don’t know what to do with power. We generally don’t talk about power in the US and how it works. We don’t connect the labor union movement and the Southern freedom movement to collective power building.

The ends don’t justify the means. We know that paternalistic decisions disconnect us from one another by refusing to engage with those who will be affected. Create spaces where you can appreciate what people bring to the table, where everyone is aware of how a decision will be made and how the decision was made once it happened. Consider what power you have in your space in the organization and help those around you understand their power as well.

Civility Silences Dissent

In the context of justice and liberation work, civility silences.

Civility doesn’t create space for understanding. Civility sets the, generally unspoken, expectations for the conversation. When we expect civility in the face of injustice we dictate the ways injustice can be communicated. Civility continues the pattern that silences oppressed groups of people by establishing rules for the ways to speak to majoritized people. The violators of the unspoken rules of civility then face a punishment, typically some form of ostracization.

Civility sets the tone of the conversation and makes it about how the message is delivered. It means we’re no longer talking about justice when someone raises a concern about injustice. It means the focus shifts to how the delivery of the message makes us feel, rather than learning about the injustice.

Civility whitewashes the history and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to turn him into a moderate while simultaneously holding him up as the only acceptable model for all organizing. Civility changes black peoples’ demands for the police to stop killing black people to all lives matter. Civility promotes the status quo because it pushes back to comfortable conversations. It prevents us from finding uncomfortable truths. And if we don’t find the truth we can’t find our way to liberation.

A one way sign points to the left in front of a road and hill.

Civility creates a whole class of politicians who tell us that we cannot teach the truth of history. Civility defends whiteness and capitalism and patriarchy and imperialism. When we demand civility we demand silence. It means we’ve heard enough of your complaints and we refuse to believe them. It means we refuse to do anything to create change and we buy into the status quo.

We need to scrutinize civility and find the insidious ways we use it as a cudgel. Civility browbeats us into staying on the surface so we cannot grasp things at the root. And if we cannot grasp things at the root, we never find the sources of the many injustices in our world. I hope we let civility go and/or radically redefine it. I hope we analyze the unspoken rules of discussion in our culture and see how those unspoken rules stand in the way of change.

Intentions for Growth in 2021

Looking back with critical reflection gives us time to think about how we can move forward. I hope to explain some of the intentions for growth I have for 2021.

2020 was challenging, to say the least. We faced a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world, we witnessed the exposure of the racist and classist foundations of our economy and healthcare systems, we saw the murder of too many black people by police and racist vigilantes, we watched our elected officials fail to attempt to understand what the rest of us are going through. There is no way that I could capture all of the things that have happened in 2020 here. Through all of this, I learned. I reflected to better understand my experiences. 2020 taught me a lot of things and I wrote about that recently right here. Those lessons will guide how I operate (and have been operating since it’s nearly June!) in 2021. Looking back with some critical reflection gives us time to think about how we can move forward and that’s my hope with this post. I hope to cover a wide amount of ground here with health, work, and what I’m calling extra credit goals which cover everything from the podcast I co-host (Interdependent Study) to work I do in another organization. I also hope to connect those all to the intentions for growth I have for the rest of 2021.

Health

Physical Health

So I definitely gained the COVID-19 pounds. At the start of the year, I wrote in a journal that I wanted to run more as that became more difficult last year so I wanted to get back to some better running form. In the midst of noticing that some of my clothes weren’t fitting quite the same, I stepped onto a scale and saw a number that I hadn’t ever seen before. I decided to register for Noom and, while I’m only a couple of weeks in, it’s going well and I’m learning a lot about my eating habits and being more mindful about what I eat and drink. I’m learning about caloric density and shifting my sweet tooth and snack tooth away from processed high-calorie foods to more fruits and vegetables. And honestly, I’m noticing a lot more about the tastes of foods already. I’m also looking forward to getting back to running more frequently in addition to using the rowing machine we bought used a few months ago.

A photo of a lake and trees at dusk — A post run photo from February 2019

Mental/emotional

At the start of this year, I wanted to journal more and focus on reflecting. That hasn’t happened much to this point. So I’m stating it here again publicly to motivate myself to write a little more in private. Developing a gratitude practice has a lot of positive benefits for mental health so I also want to pick that back up. I’ve had a subscription to MyLife, a meditation app, for years now and I want to use that more fully. They encourage check-ins to help choose which guided meditation to use and I’m afraid I’ve fallen into a rut of using a handful of the same meditations over and over again instead of exploring longer, more intensive meditations.

Family

My daughter, Molly, starts kindergarten later this year so I want to be engaged in that process and helping her learn and grow in that new environment. As a family, this will be a big transition for us so I want to be there for all of us, including myself, in helping to manage not only the logistics of this big change but also the emotions that come along with large life changes like this. I’m excited to see my little girl continue to grow up and take this next step in her education.

Work

Class -> Training

One of the major things I accomplished this year at work was the transition away from the class I used to manage. We had a class for incoming student leaders (Resident Assistants) that I believe was no longer working. It was bloated and a relatively large amount of work for students over the course of the semester for not much return on the learning for us. And this was for a class that we required them to take so it was essentially training. We knew that the discussion sections we hosted were working. Because, in my experience, when I effectively focus on application and active learning in the classroom or in training students learn more and retain more. From my view, this is because their learning is founded in the peer relationships and reflections that they are learning.

Part of this big change was flipping our in-person lectures into bite-sized video chunks and creating engaging videos from stock pictures and video clips. This process led to me needing to learn a whole lot more about sound editing, video editing, and some specific programs like Adobe Premiere Pro. But also finding creative ways to use Keynote to create these videos. I’d like to continue to create this kind of content as I think that turning 30-minute training sessions that are mostly based in a lecture style into video clips will be a better way to deliver training content as I continue in my career.

Scaffolding

As I’ve been focused on rethinking the entirety of “pre-training” for a large segment of our student leaders, it has also led me to think more about what continued training and development is needed. I think it’s widely accepted that no training or class can cover everything you ever need to know. This leads me to consider how we set training up to emphasize that learning will continue on in the position with both formal training and on-the-job learning. I would love to dive into how I can scaffold learning processes. In my work, I see that meaning that I lay a foundation for concepts, encouraging the application of those concepts through active learning instructional design, and then make connections to the times when that learning is reinforced when a student is in the position. This reinforces both the concepts that the student learned earlier and serves as a foundation for their own self-guided learning as they navigate the day-to-day work in their positions.

Extra Credit

Interdependent Study

I wrote a little bit about Interdependent Study in my previous post. Our original goals when starting the podcast were simply to establish it and create opportunities for us to have honest conversations with each other about the media we had read or watched. Now that we’re 21 episodes in, I think we’ve accomplished that fairly successfully. Now I think we’re focused on growing the audience and trying to “market” the podcast a little bit more. I’m not sure which direction we will take with that but we’d love to see growth in our statistics as we continue throughout the year. We have also always planned to add in guests once we had sort of established ourselves and the show. So now I believe we’ll start to add in some new voices to join our conversations in the next couple of months.

Organizing

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been working with a group dedicated to bringing white men into movements for collective liberation. I mentioned a bit about some things I learned in 2020 while working with them. We spent most of 2020 thinking about how we can grow the organization. My hope is that as we continue to develop effective shared, collective leadership roles and structures that we can effectively figure out how we bring new people in. We need some orientation processes and ways to help connect people to the different functions of the network. We also need to be in relationship with other organizations with whom we can create transformative alliances that would serve as a means of accountability. My hope is that this new leadership group is focused on the long-term growth of the network that gives us strong guiding principles, methods of onboarding new members, and structures for accountability both internally and externally. I’m excited to continue working on those projects throughout the year with my comrades in the network.

Closing

This is what I’ve been working on thus far in 2021 and what I hope to continue to work on. There’s a lot here, but I’m looking forward to finding ways to continue to grow and using these intentions as a platform for that growth.

Lessons I Learned in 2020

2020 was a monumental year in many ways. There are many lessons learned both individually and collectively. This post explores some of those for me.

As I wrote about earlier this year, I want to reflect more on my experiences and try to learn from them. This includes the bigger moments that happen to us collectively as well as the smaller stuff in my day-to-day life. So yes, while it’s May and we’re already 5+ months into 2021, I still want to reflect a little on 2020.

When we look back on 2020 there are so many things we will remember. The pandemic and the astonishing loss of life looms large. The way we all adjusted our lives to COVID-19 is remarkable. The uprisings in response to the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd are inspiring. They inspire in the same way that their gruesome murders are rage-inducing. I think (or hope) we will look back on the leadership of organizers and the number of people in the street as the beginning of monumental changes in fundamental values of the United States.

Pandemic Response

Mutual Aid

The response to the pandemic from the federal government and from lots of corporations was, to be polite, a disaster. However, the response from regular people and communities was inspirational and shows what we can do to support one another. Mutual aid pods appeared in neighborhoods for people to share resources and share workloads like grocery shopping. People banded together to help each other care for kids in their neighborhoods. We found ways to collaborate with one another which overturned some of our socialized capitalistic competition. I plan to continue to learn about mutual aid and, more broadly, community care as the organizing principles around it are super important as we try to find new paths to challenge the status quo. (Here’s a quick video about mutual aid and a book by Dean Spade).

Telework

I had to learn entirely new ways to do my work, which in many ways was a privilege that I know not everyone shared. Like many educators, I was in the midst of a semester-long course and had to figure out how to deliver my course (Introduction to Student Personnel, a class designed to provide foundational training to incoming resident assistants at my institution). My course featured a lecture portion and a discussion section that focused on active learning strategies.

I had to figure out how to shift the lectures to effective online videos and find ways to do asynchronous learning and create guides for 12 different discussion sections and multiple instructors. And I had to figure out how to support the student organizations I advise in moving through membership inductions, elections, and their day-to-day operations. These experiences taught me a lot about my own flexibility, problem-solving abilities, and comfort with technology. I learned a lot on the job about educational video creation and curriculum design. These skills I developed and the adjustments I made will be with me for the rest of my life. These experiences have been challenging but, in retrospect, I have a sense of gratitude for them.

Uprisings

The people organized in response to the police and vigilante murders of people. The Movement for Black Lives encouraged local community demonstrations around the Juneteenth weekend. These demonstrations were a decentralized effort but carried consistent demands that included “that police officers be held accountable for the murders of Black folks, putting pressure on elected officials to Defund The Police and instead invest in the people and community control, and on the national level calling for Trump’s Resignation.” These demands were well-reasoned and relevant to what was happening. The Movement for Black Lives has been pushing for the creative reimagining of systems in our country for years now and the summer of 2020 was a continuation of that. And I’m looking forward to what the summer of 2021 brings in pushing action, policy, and all of the conversations on how we get to collective liberation.

Organizing Work

2020 was a year of thoughtful development in an organization that I work in. We’re attempting to build something that specifically brings white men into movements for collective liberation. We think we know that has to be done and a small group of us got together and dreamed up what we believed to be a really great structure that would transform what we were doing with the men in our organization. It was challenging and fulfilling work that I believe, in retrospect, was flawed. We spent a lot of time dreaming up structures rather than values and processes in which those desired structures could thrive. This became more obvious to me when we received feedback on our ideas from some leadership in different parts of the network. We hadn’t involved many people outside of our group in discussions prior to this moment and I did a poor job of presenting my part of the vision of the network. I did not make it clear that we were still forming this vision and that our hope would be to gather some feedback and continue to build with people. So that was a huge lesson in clear communication and in creating actual participatory methods for involvement early on in processes. I think it’s easy to fall back on feedback as theater and involve people when it’s too late for their input to matter.

Family

Our time together increased and became more precious. The weight of the pandemic and the anxiety we had about whether Molly’s stint in the hospital when she was 4-5 months old for a severe case of RSV. We also had to navigate, like many families across the world, how we would care for our daughter while also keeping up with work. I’m grateful for the balance that Laura and I were able to find in structuring our schedules to make time for each other and Molly while also taking care of the responsibilities we had at work. We spent more time in nature together at a local park and found ourselves slowing down to enjoy the time additional time we had together.

Conclusion… sort of

I’m very confident that this is not all that I learned in 2020. I’ll probably look back on this right after it is published and realize I left out some monumental lesson. But another thing I’m working on is letting go of perfectionism. There are also so many people who shaped my year and learning to whom I am grateful and I hope they know who they are. And yet, they may not… this is another thing to work on. My next post will be sharing a little bit of my intention setting for the year (which will be good since the year is almost halfway gone already!)

I hope you’re able to find lessons in your 2020 experiences as well. I think we have to be able to find them even when it’s difficult, maybe especially when it’s difficult.

Writing more in 2021

There is so much to reflect on and I think reflecting in public is essential. Staying silent is a choice that I have made in the past. The US (and the world) is full of things that I think I want to respond to.

One of my intentions this year is to write more on this blog this year. My goal is to post something at least once per month and my stretch goal is that I post something once per week.

There is so much to reflect on and I think reflecting in public is essential. Staying silent is a choice that I have made in the past. Now I choose differently. There is so much in our world that we should all be responding to and I feel the need to respond to. Not because what I say will be particularly profound. Not because I will write anything 100% unique. I want to be in the habit of reflecting and writing more. I want to be more imaginative in where we can go on the path for justice. I think it should be public because I think we all need to be transparent in what we believe. Publicly stating our values for justice and liberation is crucial in the face of the world we’re in right now.

I’m sure that these writings will include some of my work on my new podcast, Interdependent Study, or some of my work with Organizing White Men for Collective Liberation.

I know one of the first things I want to write is what I learned in 2020 and another piece is what my intentions are for growth and learning in 2021. And there are a few other things I’ve had in a draft in here for over a year. But there is more to come.

Twenty Years

You’ve been gone for twenty years.

I had just turned 13. Easter weekend was coming up. And you were gone. No chance for goodbye. You were just gone. Stolen from us by the bullet of a gun.

I wish you could have seen us grow up. You didn’t get to see the football games. The orchestra performances. The graduations. The college tours. The moves. All of those memories stolen.

I wonder what it could have been like for you to be at my wedding. I wonder what it would have been like for you to hold your granddaughter when she was born or to know her now. There are so many moments over the years where I have considered what that moment would have been like with you there.

That’s the grief that hasn’t left me after twenty years. It’s imagining what we’ve missed out on. It’s holding on to all of the memories I do have from our 13 years together. I remember when we asked you to give up smoking for Christmas one year. And you just said ok and did it after years and years of smoking.

It’s realizing all the ways you’re reflected in me and how some of that is not who I want to be. It’s learning all the lessons you taught me. Whether it was what to do or what not to do. I’m grateful for all of that.

I’m curious what you would think of my career choice. Or my shift from football fanatic to soccer hooligan. Or living in Maryland outside DC. It’s also impossible to know whether I would’ve made all the choices I’ve made. My entire life trajectory may have been different.

I wanted to go back to your favorite haunts in Winter Haven and have a drink there. I wanted to bring Laura and Molly and show them around the town and what I remember.

I cannot believe it’s been twenty years. I miss you and I miss all of the things we didn’t get to do.

I’m facilitating webinars!

I’m back on the JP HigherEd team for 2018/2019! I’m facilitating 4 webinars this year, this first of which is on Tuesday, October 23rd.

One of the reasons I wanted to join the JP Higher Ed team again is to revisit some concepts from my previous stint facilitating webinars and one that is increasingly important to me. We need to know how to make social justice a practice. It needs to be something tangible that we can use in our day-to-day work.

That’s a thread that runs through my four sessions. Please check out the links to register for the webinars below. I’m really excited for all of them and hope you can make it.

Advancing Social Justice Capacities

Tuesday, October 23rd at 2 PM EST

We are inundated with news about hate bias incidents, the growth of hate groups, and governmental actions that push people further into the margins. What do we do with this? How can we continue to develop as educators? How do we make sense of this for ourselves and with our colleagues and students? We must develop and advance our capacities for social justice.

We must have frequent conversations with each other about social justice because we need to support our communities and critically analyze our own practices. To do that we need to be able to plan workshops, book clubs, curricula, affinity groups, and critical reflections of our own practices. This webinar will help us identify the needs of our community and draft plans to facilitate professional development learning.

Interrogating White Middle-Class Dominance in our Workplaces

Tuesday, December 4th at 2 PM EST

Higher Education in the United States was founded within the context of race, gender, and class dominance and those influences continue to this day. We see this in the work that we do on a daily basis. We see our students struggle to adapt to the culture of our institutions. We see “diverse hiring practices” but a lack of effort put into the retention of our diverse staff. We know that there are issues of hunger and homelessness on our campuses. How are we contributing to these issues? How can we confront these issues?

Developing a keen eye to see the influences of white middle-class dominance in our universities will help us counteract them and create more inclusive communities. In this webinar, you will see examples of these dynamics, evaluate your own workplace for these methods of dominance, and reflect on how you can create change.

Improvising Justice: Interrogating either/or viewpoints

Tuesday, January 22nd at 2 PM EST

As educators and administrators, we improvise daily. We find ways to solve problems that did not exist the day before. We create processes on the fly. Because of the speed in which we do things, there is not always time for critical reflection of these practices. We should change that.

Cornel West tells us that Jazz, an art form based on improvisation, is so much more than a musical genre, but that it’s a method of being suspicious of “either/or” viewpoints. As critical educators, it is essential that we take on this worldview as we improvise in our work. In this workshop, we’ll reflect on the ways that we improvise in our work, find ways that we’ve made mistakes in the past, and identify ways we can be suspicious of either/or viewpoints.

Developing Critical Reflection in your day-to-day work

Tuesday, April 30th at 2 PM EST (Link coming soon!)

Sometimes we live day-to-day without critically reflecting on the impact our day-to-day work has on the people around us. We can make a decision without considering the impact it will have on everyone involved. We can “use our best judgment” without reflecting on what has informed that judgment. We can unintentionally cause harm without including critical reflection in our daily practices.

We will explore what critical reflection is and why it is important for us to include in our practices. In this webinar, we will focus on strategies you can implement to reflect more critically on your daily practices in order to be a more inclusive, mindful, and engaged leader to your family, colleagues, students, and yourself.

Resisting the Klansman in Chief

We the people of these United States of America have entrenched into the executive branch of our federal government a man who overtly represents the interests of the white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist patriarchy. We have rooted our legislative and judiciary branches in the values of the party that this man represents. We have elected a man who has proven himself, through his actions and language, that he is unfit to serve the majority of our nation. He has slandered immigrants, called to ban any and all people who observe Islam from entering the country, told us he can do anything he wants to women because he’s a star, has been charged and fined for housing discrimination against black residents in his properties, been accused of sexual assault and rape by many women, evaded paying his taxes through loopholes, advocated jailing his political opponent, led the birther movement, and was endorsed by overt white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Movement. We have elected a Klansman in Chief to sit in the Oval Office and while he’s not the first overt white supremacist to sit at that desk he is taking over the office from the first ever black president and that means something.

We are never going to have all of our problems addressed by a president. Issues are solved by the people and implemented by those we elect to represent us. But we’ve elected, I believe, a man who is not responsive to all of the people and the tone of the direction of our nation is set by the person who sits in the oval office. We are now in a state of active political resistance to the potential actions and policies that have been promised by this president-elect. We now need to organize in order to prevent him and his political majority from being able to roll back progress that has been made in this country.

We need to find community with people who care about the same things we do and with those who think differently. We need to understand what it is we envision for the future and what those who think differently from us envision. We need to find out how we can merge those visions into something that allows all of us to have what we need from this country. We need to merge this into collective liberation. We need people to understand how they’re connected to the #NoDAPL movement even if they aren’t from Standing Rock. We need to see how we’re connected to the sexism the president-elect spews. We need to see how we will all be impacted by his theoretical wall and closing the borders. We need to see how stop and frisk is harmful to all our communities. We need to recognize that the militarization of our police force is harmful to all our communities. We need to know that the humanity of trans folks is not up for debate. We need to have the conversations about how the very real history (and present) of our country still impacts the lives of people of color and women and LGBTQ folx and immigrants and indigenous people and poor people and the intersections therein. That oppressive history is alive in our institutions and culture and it needs to be addressed in a real, organized manner. We need to organize. We have to think beyond elections. More of us have to recognize that by expanding rights and protections and liberty to the most marginalized people we can make the US better for everyone.

Civic engagement has never just been about voting. More has always been required and more will always be required. Today is about finding a way to make sense of what is a shocking result for many people. Tomorrow is for finding ways to get engaged to uproot white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist, patriarchy because it’s easier for us to see. And if it’s easier for us to see, we can find ways to dismantle it and build something new that represents us all. Tomorrow is for us to reconnect with our communities. Tomorrow we find pockets of our communities that hold us accountable to justice for everyone. Tomorrow we recommit to values that emphasize collective liberation and we hold our government (the executive, legislative, and judicial branches) accountable to those values. Tomorrow our work continues.

What I Get To Do Today

Alton Sterling was shot and killed by the police yesterday. There are already reports trying to justify why he was killed in the parking lot of a convenience store in Baton Rouge, LA. Those reports don’t matter to me because it’s like justifying the police’s ability to act as judge, jury, and executioner. Which, no matter what the flaws are within our criminal justice system, is not how any of this works.

Mr. Sterling’s death reminds me of the things I get to do today that he won’t. I woke up this morning to shower irritated with myself for not going to bed earlier. I made breakfast with my wife and then she dropped me off at the Metro so I can go to work.

I get to be cranky with people on the metro and hold the door for others. I get to talk with people and interact about whatever we want to talk about. I get to move freely through DC without someone’s negative assumptions of me impacting my life in a meaningful way. I get to be upset by the heat in DC and wipe my brow of sweat.

I will get to exist without anyone diving into my history. No one is doing a deep dive into my past to try to justify my death. I get to sit and type this reflection on my feelings in reaction to Mr. Sterling’s death. I get to about how his murder is connected to the murder of my own father.

I get to write letters to the Department of Justice for them to investigate new ways of training the police departments across the US and the federal law enforcement agencies. I get to ask Lorette Lynch to consider addressing implicit bias in the justice system that disproportionately imprisons and kills people of color across the US.

I get to exist.
I get to live.
I get to feel.
I get to think.
I get to challenge.
I get to push.
I get to question.
I get to be me in ways so many people across the world are denied.
I have full access to my humanity and life today. Alton Sterling does not. We all need to consider how we deal with that information. I’m torn up about it and I feel the need to do something about it because another life has turned into a hashtag. We need to consider how to change the roots of how our civil servants work for us. We need to consider how our systems don’t serve us all in the same way. We need to accept criticism and recognize that nothing is free from criticism and dissent. Expressing dissatisfaction with the way things are is one of the foundations of our society.

I’m dissatisfied and I’m telling people about it. What are you doing today?